Michael Chong Is A Victim Of Institutional Failure

On Today's News

On Wednesday, Justin Trudeau said that he only found out about the threats to Michael Chong’s family when the Globe published them on their Monday front page. He said it on camera, and said that the CSIS document referred to in the Globe hadn’t been more wildly circulated. In the House of Commons today, Michael Chong said that National Security Advisor Jody Thomas told Chong that the Privy Council Office had received the July 2021 report.

It has now come out in the Star that Chong confirmed that Thomas told him that neither Trudeau or Katie Telford knew about it at the time, which does alleviate much of the pressure on the Prime Minister for now, but it does make one very important question come back to the surface, which is how the fuck do we have a civil service that thinks they can fucking hide this shit from our elected officials?

…

I tweeted this before I saw the Star report, but let’s be very clear about this – if Justin Trudeau lied about this on Wednesday he needs to resign. I feel no reticence or caution saying this – a Prime Minister’s word has to mean something, and someone who can look down a camera and straight up lie about an issue this serious is one that is manifestly unfit to serve as Prime Minister.

Let’s also get in front of something – Michael Chong hasn’t lied about anything and a lot of the people claiming he has are trying to discredit someone who is having a substantially worse week than any of us. Was his Monday statement shit? Yes. Does he get a pass because he found out his family has actually been targeted by the PRC, as opposed to merely fearing it might be a possibility? Of course he does. In terms of actually lying, he hasn’t, and anyone saying he has is spinning to protect their partisanship.

What we do know, or come as close to knowing as we can in a situation like this, is that the PMO wasn’t apparently told about Chong because it didn’t rise to the level of being worthy of being told to them. That is what Trudeau said the reason for CSIS not briefing it out was, but apparently it wasn’t CSIS who made the decision to not brief it up to a political level, it was the PCO.

Did Chong lie in the House by not including the detail that Trudeau and Telford weren’t told? I get the case for it, but he’s an opposition politician and I get why he isn’t going to volunteer information that saves the government’s ass. I don’t love it, but I get it, which is why I don’t hold him to the standards most of my Twitter mentions are right now. But here’s the thing – if what Thomas told Chong is true, then this has been a massive institutional failure from our civil service and heads must roll immediately.

The main question about all of this scandal the last two months hasn’t been whether or not it’s an important story or not but whether it’s a political scandal or a governance one, because the failures entailed here are absolutely failures. What we’ve been grappling with is whether or not the failures are institutional or not, and a lot of people including the press have wanted it to be a political story because much of our media has the attention spans of a dog with a laser pointer going. Institutional failures are allowed to persist because we have not demanded they get fixed in this country, be it our local police forces to the RCMP to environmental assessments.

Here, we seem to have clear evidence of institutional failure, because we definitely have a failure (Chong should have fucking known) and based on Chong’s recounting of the conversation with Thomas, the political masters didn’t know about it, which changes the dynamic of the failure. If one person in our government really has the power to decide whether the PMO gets this information or not, then our entire system needs to be rebuilt. If there is a broader system and that system decided the PMO didn’t need to know, then it needs to be destroyed. But either way this is unacceptable.

Clearly this is not a tenable position for this country – we either have a civil service trying to run foreign and security policy around the politicians, or we have a PMO and a Prime Minister who are willing to lie to our faces about this most important issue. It’s likely institutional failure, and that’s a huge fucking crisis for all of us, because at some point the damage of institutional failures will end up putting this country at danger. I don’t know when, but at some point the accumulated damage of all of this will come through and fuck us. And that is a horrifying process.

Michael Chong has been failed by what is likely institutional failures by our natsec community and our civil service, and we need to do everything we can to ensure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. If he has also been failed by the Prime Minister, we deserve a new one. But if it was an institutional failure, then we have to be prepared to see through the deep, searing changes that will make sure it never happens again.